Paul Van Heeswyk Analysing Adolescence, London,  Sheldon Press, 1997, £12.99.

The title and cover photos of this book (clumpy lace-up boots in black and white) convey something of an orthodox, even plodding, approach to this well-worked subject. You do not have to read too far however to have such a preconception overturned. This is far from orthodox, and plodding it is not. The author, a psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapist, quickly dismisses a view of adolescence based on a ‘teleology of developmental tasks … kick-started by puberty’. Such theories for ‘ordering the unorderable’ are nonsense, he suggests, and ‘our developmental timetables’ are better used like those we peruse at the bus-stop — ‘not to be taken seriously but serving as a distraction while we wait’.

While setting the iconoclastic tone of the book, the author does stop short of completely debunking mainstream psychoanalytic theory, much of which is brilliant and inspirational, he says, ‘but it needs to be liberated from its confinement to the years between short trousers and long skirts’. This sentence is one possible key to the book, which, if I have understood it at all, seeks to establish adolescence as a state of mind resident in the human psyche at any age and not projectively confined by the adult majority to the young people to whom we normally attach such a label.

This book defies easy classification or definition. Its theme may be said to be a combination of two linked ideas. One is that young people